The kobzars and the sung epic: a tradition that was ended

The kobzars were itinerant singers, characteristically blind, who performed a body of narrative verse called dumy while accompanying themselves on the kobza or bandura. They travelled between villages, market fairs and monasteries, and they were a recognised social institution rather than a scattering of individual performers.

The form

A duma is not a song in the ordinary sense. The verse is unrhymed and irregular — lines vary in length according to the sense rather than a metre — and it is performed in a declamatory style closer to recitative than to melody, with instrumental passages between sections.

The subject matter is historical and elegiac. Captivity in the Crimean and Ottoman slave markets and escape from it; the Cossack campaigns; the death of a warrior far from home; the return of a son; laments for the destruction of a town. The tone is consistently sorrowful and the endings are frequently unresolved.

The best of them are substantial compositions running to several hundred lines, and the performer improvised within a fixed narrative frame rather than reciting a memorised text.

The guilds

What distinguishes this tradition from wandering musicians elsewhere is the degree of organisation.

Kobzars belonged to regional brotherhoods with their own governance. Entry required a formal apprenticeship of several years to a master, an examination, and an initiation ceremony after which the graduate received the right to perform independently and a territory in which to do it.

The guilds maintained a secret argot — lebiiska mova — used among members and not intelligible to outsiders. They had rules about conduct, about how earnings were handled, about mutual support for members who could no longer travel.

Blindness was near-universal among them and was not incidental. In a rural society with no provision for disabled men, the guild was a functioning welfare and employment institution, and the skill it taught was one a blind man could master and monetise.

What happened

The tradition was already declining by the early twentieth century under the pressure of printed literature, changing musical taste and the collapse of the fair circuit.

What ended it was the 1930s. The historical record on this is contested in its details and clear in its outline: the guild system was dismantled, performers were pressured to abandon the traditional repertoire in favour of newly composed material praising the state, and a significant number of kobzars disappeared during the period of collectivisation and terror. The accounts of a mass gathering from which participants did not return are debated by historians as to scale and specifics; that the tradition as a living guild practice ended in that decade is not debated.

What survived was the instrument. The bandura was preserved, redesigned into a chromatic concert instrument, taught in conservatories and used for ensemble performance — which is a genuine continuation of one thing and the end of another.

Where to hear it

Reconstructed performance of the traditional style exists and has grown considerably since the 2000s. Practitioners have worked from the ethnographic recordings made before 1930, rebuilt the historical instruments, and relearned the declamatory technique.

It is not the same as an unbroken tradition and nobody involved claims it is. It is a scholarly reconstruction performed with conviction, and the recordings are worth seeking out — the form is unlike anything else in European folk music, and the historical recordings, thin and scratchy as they are, carry something the concert bandura does not.

Related in this archive

• Trypillia: the culture beneath the black soil
• Molfars: the Carpathian practitioners and what they were for
• The rushnyk: cloth as a ritual instrument

Ending a profession that had its own training and its own guild is, seen from my side, more than a cultural loss: it is the severing of a system for transmitting knowledge. The same happens in industry — when the masters go, what disappears is not the technique but the method of teaching it. It can be relearned and it does not come back the same.